How the San Francisco Standard uses Graze to hone their social media strategy

Of the long list of damage that platforms like Facebook, X, and Instagram have left in their wake, the gutting of local news is likely among the most harmful to our society. As platforms gobbled up our attention and mediated how we accessed information, they came to dictate what content was valuable. From the calamitous pivot to video to attempts by nations to regulate the problem, it’s hard to make a case that social media has, 20 years on, left local news better off than it was before.

As platforms wedged themselves into the informational fabric as middle men between newsrooms and the communities they serve, they stripped the agency of how those newsrooms would engage with their readers. These days, the most “choice” that newsrooms have online is the relatively ineffectual ability to schedule the timing of their posts using a range of tools that all seem to overpromise and underdeliver. Mostly, the approach appears to involve posting and praying that the algorithm swings in your favor.

Bluesky, along with the ATProto it’s built on, offers us the first chance in a generation to revisit the fundamental power arrangement of social media. Here at Graze, we’re working day and night to take this opportunity to build a better social media for the next generation. Part of that mission is to empower newsrooms to redefine the future of audience engagement will look. Today, we’re sharing a bit about how the San Francisco Standard is leading with a vision of a new way to engage their community, and how they used Graze to deliver 4.3 million posts to readers to date.

Bluesky’s custom feeds feature has been used to create robust communities such as BookSky, and services like the Verified News feed. But the feature has been underexplored as a tool for brands, particularly newsrooms, to directly engage with their audiences on Bluesky. Graze is building a pathway to do that and change how newsrooms use social media.

The San Francisco Standard’s Trending News Feed

As a very basic demonstration, The Standard runs a “trending” feed that shows its top trending articles on Bluesky at any point in time. On legacy platforms, The Standard has little control over how or when their content will appear. On Bluesky, an engaged reader can pin The Standard’s feeds to their homepage and maintain a persistent relationship with the newsroom with the swipe of a finger. Over time, with personalization, a tailored newsroom experience for every reader has the potential to completely change how the news reaches readers.

The San Francisco Standard’s SF HQ Feed

The other experiment that The Standard is running is the San Francisco HQ feed. Instead of simply sharing relevant news from The Standard, the HQ feed provides a space for the community to congregate on Bluesky. People discussing the Giants, photographers capturing a beautiful day in the city, and residents debating municipal policies can all find a space for themselves in the HQ feed. Here, instead of directly republishing their work, they create a space that enhances the platform’s value for their readers in the first place.

Flipping the Power Imbalance

While these feeds are interesting and helpful, we believe newsrooms can take this approach even further. By taking advantage of custom feeds, for the first time, newsrooms can make social media a profit generator rather than just a means to stay afloat.

Custom feeds give feed operators total control over how content is displayed in their feed and what content ends up there. In the case of both the trending and the HQ feeds, this means that The Standard could selectively inject stories they want to drive traffic towards selectively into readers’ feeds. On Bluesky, they now have control over their social strategy in a transformative way.

Going even further, if newsrooms control the order and nature of what content is shown and when, the decision to run sponsored content is on the table. Alongside the posts, newsrooms can remind readers to sign up for a subscription or run sponsored content from partners that already advertise on their website.

By using Graze-built custom feeds on Bluesky, newsrooms like The Standard can directly cultivate their relationship with their audience, and for the first time, not in some vague or abstract way. Because they own the experience from start to finish, newsrooms are empowered to make strategic decisions about audience engagement, monetization, and content like never before.